Timeblog.net

I always wondered how people managed to get up in earlier times. I mean, before they had alarm clocks. Even with an alarm clock, I can hardly get up. But, Mental Floss to the rescue, they had knocker-ups.

In British towns of yore, particularly those with a mine or mill as the center of commercial activity, knocker-ups were responsible for going from house to house to wake workers in the mornings. The title, not surprisingly, came from the sound they made rapping on windows. As for the evolution of the term “knocking,” it also denoted a collision of sorts, and in the 17th century, it was used in reference to childbirth. Even poet John Keats wrote of “knocking out” children in some of his odes. It wasn’t until the 19th century, however, that Americans began using the phrase as slang for getting a woman pregnant.

Well, they probably didn’t exist anywhere, and who woke up the knocker-ups? So, problem only partly solved. But 9 more interesting job descriptions in the article…

Of many great articles on a fantastic Blog (Science-Base Medicine), this article might well be the best yet. David Gorski writes about the use of bad scientific arguments against animal research. A must read for any non-ignorant human!

The first two projects I contributed to on Kiva finished recently, and I have to say I feel somewhat proud. It’s mixed feelings, because I don’t want feel superior in any way, it’s just that seeing that such a small contribution on my part helped two people stand on their own feet. Now I can see the new food stand of Hernan Caise (bottom of the page) and hope that I also helped Samuel Isesele. The money that was paid back went right into the next project. I wanted to spend it on two projects but somehow managed to misclick and gave 50$ to one project - doesn’t matter.
What matters is that Kiva and microlending offers a way to maturely help people. But giving them money, you offer them to realize what they want to do. But demanding the money back as a credit, you offer them to do it without losing their pride - which is the single most important thing you have to do when helping people.

68

Pretty hard with english names…

36%

32

Even harder…

In the sidebar, you will now find a link leading to my page I assembled on soup.io, that collects all my other feeds (2 blogs, one new tumblr-log, diggs, del.icio.us-links and Pownce posts) and displays them. Much better, you also get a combined feed of all my posts! I recommend you use that feed instead of the single ones.
Does anyone know a better play on words for soup for the headline?

Do you really have to set commas before which or that, or, as I know that there is not only one possible way to write in english, is there one school that says to set commas before each which or that? I’m just reading a text where this is done, and it’s confusing to no end.

2008 is the International Year of the Potato! Looking at the pictures of potato varieties makes me a) hungry and b) sad that Germany mostly has the same boring potatoes. I want red and violet ones too! Potatoes are great, and the base of most meals when I was young. That was the traditional lunch for my great-parents: Soup, then meat with potatoes (and something beans or some other vegetables).

Bausell points out that penicillin cures pneumonia even if you’re in a coma, but alternative medicine only seems to work when you are awake.

Science Based Medicine » Snake Oil Science

A very good blog article that talks about a book by Barker Bausell on the analysis of “snake oil medicine”, e.g. acupuncture or homeopathy in trials, and about how these trials themselves are often so unreliable that many result in seemingly mildly positive reviews. But all the studies done with care - that involves a lot of factors - produce negative results. Especially when analyzing whether a medical effect is real or a placebo effect (by real, I mean reproducible effect->cause), small deviations during trials, e.g. in choosing the patients (patients that believe in homeopathy might be more inclined to participate in these studies), in analyzing the psychological effects (did they patients guess in which group they were?) crucially influence the outcome.
This article answered some questions I didn’t have answers to so far. Good to know.

Akismet has caught 20,347 spam for you since you first installed it.

Wow…